Freakonomics

Title: Freakonomics

Author: Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner

Publisher: Penguin 2006 (First published 2005)

ISBN: 978-0-141-01901-7

Pages: 284

This book is really a thriller, but with focus on economics, albeit in an unusual and unorthodox manner. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. His idiosyncratic economic research into areas as varied as guns and game shows has invited criticism as well as praise from the readers. Dubner is a journalist, who first visited Levitt to interview him, but later formed a team to publish Levitt’s original works of special thoughts.

According to the author, economics is the science, or rather the art, of getting things done by monetary incentives. By this loose definition, Levitt has set aside for him a vast area of societal activity where none of peers had dared to take a peek. Some of the points he had analysed in this work are why the crime rate had fallen in the U.S. in the nineties, what do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common, how is the Ku-Klux-Klan like a group of real-estate agents, why do drug dealers still live with their moms, where have all the criminals gone and what makes a parent perfect? The crux of the argument puts him a different pedestal accessible and conducive to the hearts of the lay readers. For example, criminologists had put forward a number of reasons for the crime drop, the main one being police reforms. Levitt declines to accept the veracity of this point. In fact, the argument given by him is rather gruesome, but plausible. In the early 70s, there was a noted case, Roe vs Wade by which the Federal Supreme Court granted the right to abortion to the prospective mother in all American states. This naturally resulted in a spree of abortions. Levitt argues that a woman opts to abort a child to rescue herself and the child from a scenario in which the child is unwanted or the financial position is difficult or she might be a single parent to the child. All these three factors make up the breeding ground of criminals and by selectively removing them from society before they were born, the public at large has gained by reduction in the crime rate.

Levitt agrees that his arguments may not be ethical or not pleasing to the morals of collective conscience, and also that his finding should not be seen as either an endorsement of abortion or a call for intervention by the state in the fertility decisions of women. Crime might just as easily be curbed by providing better environments for those children at greatest risk for future crime! In the chapter on sumo wrestlers, the author concludes that what these behemoths and school teachers have in common is that they both cheat! The wrestlers knowingly lose games, if their positions are not jeopardised and the contestant’s fate hangs in the result of the game. In the case of teachers, they have a clear incentive to project good results for their class. To accomplish this, some of them resort to cheating by marking right answers for backward students. Levitt developed an algorithm to see through the mischief which identified some teachers as potential cheaters. The school organisation followed up through repeated testing and measuring the students’ onward progress. The algorithm was very accurate and did its job pretty well.

The book is easy to read, absorbing and original in outlook. The author has the ordinary reader in mind throughout the text. Some chapters, especially the one which ‘proves’ that your name (in the U.S., of course) somehow affects where you end up is unconvincing, though great research has gone into compiling the lists of most popular first names common among black and white children. His cavalier attitude to traditional methods of learning are deplorable though, like his assertion that he don’t know much of economics and his mathematical faculties claimed to be miserable for a person of his rank.

The book is highly recommened.

Rating: 3 Star